Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Crappy for free is still crappy

According to this ZDNet story, Microsoft is going to release MS Works as a free or ad-supported program or service or something. Not too clear on the details.

That's "release" as in, "Release the sick deer back into the wild where it can become part of the circle of life... as dinner for a mountain lion."

My poor father has used the bass-ackwards, clapped-up, nasty word processor part of MS Works for, like, 20 years. Or it seems like that. To the kid in charge of technical services for the family. I want to put the guy back on Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS, 'cause at least that program worked and didn't eat so much of his memory that he couldn't run his screen-saver without going Blue Death.

I have a definition of a user of a free or (god love 'em for trying) ad-supported version of MS Works: a sap who's never heard of Google Docs or Open Office.

Fairness Note: I don't mind MS Word. The new 2007 version does some cool stuff. But MS Works should be allowed to drift off into the ocean on a chunk of ice to be with its ancestors.